The wide-ranging Whitney Museum of American Art is cool

The Whitney, which focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art, moved into this Renzo Piano-designed building in 2015; unlike the Met and MOMA which are huge, the Whitney can be enjoyed in a couple of hours

Kitchen, Liza Lou, 1996; this very cool (and huge!) work took 5+ years as the artist covered every surface in small beads; she highlights gender inequality, racism and other societal ills as well

Queensborough Bridge, Edward Hopper, 1913; the bridge extending diagonally into the background allows Hopper to let near objects merge gradually with more distant ones - just as Monet did with such virtuosity in his series of Waterloo Bridge paintings

Summer Days, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1936; the artist would collect bones on her sojourns west since she felt the bones cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive in the desert

Bound Logs, Jackie Winsor, 1973; the museum was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a wealthy and prominent American socialite and art patron (what would she thought of this work?)

Three Flags, Jasper Johns, 1958; this work was made through the use of encaustic, a mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax that congeals as each stroke is applied; the resulting accumulation of discrete marks creates an almost sculptural surface

Big Red, Alexander Calder, 1959; for his mature, wind-driven mobiles, Calder sought the random movement induced by air currents, but controlled it through carefully calibrated systems of weights and balances

Before and After, Andy Warhol, 1962; Warhol based this composition on a small advertisement for a plastic surgeon that ran in the National Enquirer in early April 1961, I never thought of the National Enquirer as inspiring art before

Gettin' Religion, Archibald John Motley Jr, 1948; one of the first African-Americans to attend school at the Art Institute of Chicago, Motley painted one of his iconic Chicago street scenes in this work which I loved

Door to the River, Willem de Kooning, 1960; the artist described his paintings as emotions, most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it

The Lord Is My Shepherd, Thomas Hart Benton, 1926; this painting depicts a deaf couple at their home on Martha's Vineyard where the artist summered for 50+ years

Bathroom, Roy Lichtenstein, 1961; the Whitney, conveniently located at the southern end of the High Line and adjacent to Little Island, costs $25 with timed reservations required

Giant Fagends, Claes Oldenburg; 1967; whatever negative, non-glamorous associations one has about cigarettes—carcinogenic smoke, grubby fingers, stained teeth, and so on—come to the fore here

Number 27, Jackson Pollock, 1950; Pollock said: On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting

Winter Twilight, Charles Burchfield, 1930; the artist was a close friend of Edward Hopper who said of him - the work of Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best

Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, Joseph Stella, 1939; by combining contemporary architecture and historical allusions, Stella transformed the Bridge into a 20th-century symbol of divinity, the quintessence of modern life and the Machine Age

Untitled, Robert Gober, 1991; this sculpture is meticulously crafted to be highly realistic, yet it is also disturbingly altered; the work also suggests a vigil, a sense of time passing and running out, and of bodies melting away

The Beauty of Summer, Miriam Schapiro, 1974; in 1972 this proud feminist began incorporating textiles onto painted canvas surfaces and intentionally chose items associated with women's work in the home

Yoicks, Robert Rauschenberg, 1954; with its inclusion of cartoons and a title derived from a comic strip exclamation, this work is whimsical and exuberant, a departure from the monochromatic paintings that had occupied the artist during the early 1950s

Skywalker/Skyscraper, Marie Watt, 2012; here a stack of blankets has been pierced by an I-beam, a reference to the Mohawk ironworkers who helped build many of Manhattan's skyscrapers starting in the 1920s

Cupboard VIII, Simone Leigh, 2018; this piece is a multilayered representation of Black womanhood where the character resists being subjected to outmoded notions of the female body as a vessel

J+K, Alan Shields, 1972; this work, made of acrylic, thread and beads on canvas, could mean most anything or nothing at all I suppose; it was at least colorful and might match the furniture